St. Louis’s First Total Solar Eclipse Since 1442

“Holy cow, can you believe it?” the county parks director said, as four thousand people held their faces up to the sun.

Photograph by Jeff Roberson / AP

By 10:30 A.M., the heat index had already crept above ninety degrees.
Somehow, though, the Abraham Lincoln impersonator was barely glowing in
his three-piece suit and top hat as he mingled with the crowd at
Jefferson Barracks Park, in south St. Louis. According to Steve Stenger,
the county executive, more than four thousand people had gathered for
this, the official Great American Total Solar Eclipse viewing party for
St. Louis County, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the
path of totality.

“This will be my first total solar eclipse,” Lincoln told me, bemoaning
the fact that he had been in the wrong place to see both the annular
eclipse of 1831, on his twenty-second birthday, and the dramatic total
eclipse of 1834. For most of the assembled crowd, the same was true:
this region hadn’t seen a total solar eclipse since 1442. At the time,
the area was settled by Native Americans of the Mississippian
mound-building culture, whose most impressive legacy lay twenty miles
away, on the other side of the river. The ceremonial city of Cahokia,
which at its peak, in 1100, was larger than Paris or London at the time,
was built along astronomical lines, with carefully aligned mounds and a
wooden version of Stonehenge serving to mark the solstices.
Archeologists speculate that the site’s construction, which appears to have taken place almost
overnight, was inspired by another celestial event: a supernova as bright
as the full moon that lit up the skies over the region for nearly a
month, in 1054. By 1350, however, for reasons that archeologists do not
yet understand, the city had been abandoned—forgotten so thoroughly that
its original name is lost to history. (Its ruins were christened
“Cahokia” by colonizing Europeans in the seventeenth century, after the
local Illinois tribe.)

On Monday, the region’s contemporary inhabitants performed their own
rituals to prepare for the coming heavenly spectacle. They played
cornhole, took selfies, tossed Frisbees. The atmosphere in the park was
part tailgate, part beach vacation, as families and couples, groups and
individuals settled into deck chairs, reached into their capacious
coolers, and ripped open chips, cheese puffs, and Cracker Jacks. The
better prepared among them spread out on the lawn, sheltered from the
sun’s still-undiminished rays under umbrellas and tents; the rest of us
clustered together in the pools of shade beneath trees. From the park’s
stage, a band pumped out forgettable blues-rock to an audience that was,
with the exception of a man in flared jeans performing the Macarena
alone, seemingly conserving its enthusiasm for the main event.

Photograph by Nicola Twilley

Near the Porta Potties, a man named Jason had a box on his head—a
personal eclipse theatre, with a pinhole on one side to project the
sun’s light onto a sheet of white paper. The exterior was decorated with
silver duct tape and hearts, and the interior had been painstakingly
blacked out with Sharpie. “I had to let it dry out for a while, because
the fumes were insane,” Jason told me, explaining that he’d built his
contraption because he didn’t trust eclipse glasses to protect his eyes.
A man waiting for nachos nearby said, “I bet that thing’s a babe magnet,
though.” On the other side of the park, in the shade of a
honeysuckle-choked tree, the blonde host of the local Fox affiliate
repeated her voice-over to the camera again and again, while a young mother
in a NASA T-shirt and cutoffs separated two of her
squabbling children while explaining the science behind Bailey’s beads to the third. (The bright-white beads, which sometimes ring the eclipsed
sun during totality, are a result of its light passing over the moon’s
uneven surface.)

Finally, shortly before the eclipse was to begin, Stenger stepped up to
the mike to sing the national anthem. In front of me, a man wearing a
T-shirt that said “Well, I’m Just One Big Freaking Ray of Sunshine,
Aren’t I?” reached behind his wife to gently cuff his son, who quickly
removed his baseball hat and held it over his heart. As a city
councilmember praised both Stenger’s lungs and the universe’s “grand
design,” and a U.S. Postal Service representative recited dozens of fun
facts about the agency and its commemorative eclipse stamp, the moon
crept across the face of the sun, painfully slowly at first, and then
with what seemed like gathering speed. When just a red thumbnail of sun
remained, Gary Bess, the director of St. Louis County Parks and
Recreation, switched off the music, cutting Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of
the Night” short so that we could hear the cicadas start to chirp. “Holy
cow, can you believe it?” he said over the P.A. system, as thousands of
people held their faces up to the sun, cardboard glasses clutched
tightly over their ears. The sky took on the uncanny darkness of an
evening thunderstorm, lit in shades of purple and peach around the
edges; the temperature fell, abruptly and blissfully; and a gentle
breeze picked up, pushing a handful of clouds in from the west.

Before the clouds could obscure the last pinprick crescent of the sun,
it slid behind the moon and the crowd convulsed, whooping, screaming,
clapping, and pointing at the white-ringed black hole where it used to
be. “Look at that!” a man yelled. “Would you just look at that!” My armsprickled with goose bumps, and the minute and a half of totality felt no
longer than a head-spinning ten seconds. A point of light grew on the
right edge of the moon, glinting like the diamond in a ring,
and we let out a collective sigh. As the sky returned to its afternoon
blue, a middle-aged woman behind me, her face wet with tears, stretched
her hands out toward a nearby boy, saying, “Do you know what you just
saw, young man?”

Slowly, at first, and then (perhaps thinking of the line to get out of
the parking lot) with greater speed, the eclipse-watchers began to pack
up. “That was awesome,” said a man in a fast-food uniform. “I’m supposed
to be at work.” Sunburned, stunned, and clutching souvenir T-shirts, we
filed back out of the park. Abraham Lincoln stood off to one side near
the entrance, nodding to passersby, a wistful smile on his face. “I’m
glad I didn’t miss it this time,” he said, as I wished him goodbye.
“That was something.”

Nicola Twilley is a contributing writer for newyorker.com. She is the author of the blog Edible Geography and a co-host of the Gastropod podcast. She is working on a book about refrigeration.